The global power business was already in a state of permanent, conflicted anxiety about China. With the sluggish global economy, everyone needed China’s massive market if they wanted to be able to show sales growth. But the theft of intellectual property in China was so real a threat that GE regularly reassured investors and journalists that it never sold its most state-of-the-art machines there, knowing that if it did they might be reverse-engineered by Chinese competitors. Now Brussels was asking GE to give a turbine program—one less advanced than GE’s or Siemens’s but better than Shanghai
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